330 The Diary of a Drug Fiend
Object of familiarising the mind with ideas which
normally excited.
The whole system of King Lamus was to enable
people to take no notice, that is, no emotional notice,
of anything soever in life. A great deal of the fascination
of drugs arises from the fuss that is made about them;
the focusing of the attention upon them. Absinthe,
forbidden in France, Switzerland, and Italy, is still sold
freely in England, and no one ever met an English
absinthe fiend. If any one took it into his head to
start a newspaper campaign against absinthe, it would
become a public danger in very short order.
King Lamus emancipated people’s minds by adopting
the contrary formula. He had all sorts of dodges for
compelling people to accept the most startling sights
and sounds as commonplace. The very children were
confronted with the most terrifying ideas while they
were still too young to have acquired settled phobias.
Hermes, at the age of five, was already accustomed
to witness surgical operations and such things, to face
the dangers of drowning and falling from cliffs, with
the result that he had completely lost his fear of such
things.
These principles were explained to us during the
breathing spaces between the sets. Sister Cypris and
three or four others came down from the other houses
to take part in the game.
The intense activity and lightheartedness of every-
body amazed us. We were asked to join in the game,
and our incompetence was a keen source of annoyance.
We were too enfeebled by our indulgence in drugs to
hold our own ; and the result was to inspire us with a
passionate determination to emancipate ourselves from
the thraldom.
But the tribulations of the morning had only begun.
It was the custom of the Abbey to celebrate the arrival
of new-comers by a picnic on the top of the rock. From
the Abbey, a path leads through a patch of trees to a
rough narrow track between two walls. At the end